english 131.plk1 - writing experience lakeland

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English 131.PLK1 - Writing Experience

Spring 2020

Syllabus & Schedule

July 6-August 22

Lakeland Correctional Facility

Instructor: Ms. Taylor

Course Text: Writing Today by Richard Johnson-Sheehan and Charles Paine

Student Edition ISBN: 13: 978-0-13-480804-8 OR ISBN 10:0-13-480804-5

Course Materials:

1. Pencils/pens

2. Notebook to take notes

3. Process folder to keep writing assignments in

Prerequisites: ENG 086 and ENG 091

Course Description: This is an intensive writing course. Narrative and descriptive modes are

stressed. Basic research strategies are introduced. An end-of-the-semester portfolio is required.

Continued Description:

This is an intensive writing course. Narrative and descriptive modes are stressed. Basic research

strategies are introduced in concert with a formal report. An end of the semester reflective letter is

mandatory along with submitting the peer reviewed drafts of your final essays. These submitted

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essays will comprise the portfolio of your polished writing that constitutes 30% of your grade. I

encourage you to take notes and keep all your writing exercises in your process folder. This will help

to track your progress throughout the course.

Learners engage the writing process discovering how writing is both process and product, study the

impact of the rhetorical situation on communication choices, and are introduced to academic

research strategies while completing units of memoir, profile, and report.. The course requires

participation in discussions, course activities, and guided peer review which will take the shape of a

proof reading/peer review exercise coordinated with each essay. Developing the ability to apply

Modern Language Association (MLA) style and conventions to written assignments is expected.

Standard English grammar and structures are requisite skills in this course.

Instructor Role: Facilitator.

Learner Role: Independent and Collaborative

· Learner success relies on the ability to plan, prepare, study, and engage phases of the writing

process, to apply global and local essay strategies, critical thinking skills, research strategies, and peer

response skills.

· Learners will create three essays. Essays will be accompanied by a title page and, when sources are

used, a Works Cited page. Specific page lengths will be defined in essay assignments.

· Learners will apply active reading strategies to assigned course materials and can expect to

encounter a chapter of reading associated with each essay assignment, as well as supplemental

selections.

· Learners need to plan to spend at least nine [9] hours a week on the course, including assigned

readings, collaborative discussions, and individualized writing.

Course Goals and Objectives:

The Board of Trustees has determined that all JCC graduates should develop or enhance certain

essential skills while enrolled in college:

Educational Objectives: Knowledge, Skills and Abilities Students Acquire from this Course

1. Employ parts of the recursive writing process--including pre-writing/discovery, planning, focusing, organizing, drafting, revising, proofreading, and evaluating sources--to achieve purpose in audience-centered communication

2. Articulate and demonstrate use of rhetorical situation—purpose, audience, context-- in consciously crafted, audience-focused writing

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3. Use genres to navigate complex rhetorical challenges and compose texts that achieve purpose and meet audience needs

4. Demonstrate ability to employ narrative, descriptive, and informative strategies in consciously crafted, audience-focused writing

5. Identify assumptions, point of view, and implications born of reasoning

6. Identify, explain, and employ concepts clearly

7. Demonstrate functional organizational structure appropriate to genre and modality

8. Employ strategies for developing and supporting claims appropriate to rhetorical situation

9. Employ Write to Learn methods through reflective writing and active reading strategies

10. Research for further understanding and additional knowledge

11. Demonstrate research skills: establish research question, define type of information needed; identify where to find information; triangulate sources; evaluate information

12. Integrate, cite, and document sourced material

13. Practice correct grammar and usage

14. Work collaboratively and as a member of a team

15. Identify and assess the contributions of self and others working on a team

General Education Outcome Addressed in this Course: GEO 1: Writing Clearly, Concisely,

and Intelligibly

Outcome The Student

Process ● Uses parts of the recursive process in

writing, which may include pre-writing,

drafting, revising, editing.

● Evaluates sources when used.

Rhetorical Situation:

Purpose, Audience

● Demonstrates appropriate purpose and

audience for context.

Organization and Development ● Demonstrates functional organizational

structure appropriate to genre;

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● Provides examples and details that

support ideas and content; appropriate to

genre.

Meaning/

Understanding

● Researches and writes for further

understanding and additional knowledge.

● Employs write to learn methods through

reflective writing and research for further

understanding and additional knowledge.

Use of Sources and Documentation ● Demonstrates ability to find and evaluate

credible sources.

● Demonstrates correct documentation of

sources when appropriate.

Conventional Grammar and Sentence

Structures

● Correctly uses grammar and mechanics.

● Demonstrates clear meaning.

Course Objectives:

Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing Processes

· Practice active reading strategies

· Identify and evaluate assumptions

· Offer formative feedback on others writing in peer review sessions

· Use genres to navigate complex rhetorical challenges

· Distinguish one’s own ideas from those of others

· Practice metacognitive reflection

Rhetorical Knowledge and Conventions

· Use effective rhetorical strategies

· Recognize discipline-specific writing conventions

· Employ Modern Language Association (MLA) style in academic writing

· Writing in Plain Style—simple and direct language

Electronic Environment

· Use Microsoft Word to compose, revise, and save documents

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· Locate research material collected from electronic sources, including library databases and

other electronic networks and internet sources

Course Organization:

The course is divided into three units, one for each essay. The unit work will consist of reading,

group and pair activities, discussions, setting the foundation through practice and greater

understanding of the essay assignment.

Course Assignments:

Three Essays:

You will complete three essays in the course that are 3-5 pages in length. They will be formatted per

MLA, which will be elaborated on as the class progresses. The three essays will include:

· Memoir

· Profile

· Formal report

Portfolio/Reflection Letter:

Portfolio: The revised and polished essays that you submit for a grade will serve as the essays for

your final portfolio. No further revision is required. This means that you will have these essays

peer reviewed by two other peers before submitting them for a grade.

The essays you submit for instructor assessment must have undergone at least one revision, using

the Proofreading Exercises that are provided with each unit and building off the feedback provided

to you by your peers.

Your portfolio will contain at least two but most likely all three of your polished essays, 10 pages

minimum. Your portfolio serves as a final exam for English 131 and should demonstrate both the

strength of your writing skills and an awareness of the audience you wish to reach.

The College’s Composition Faculty recommend that prior to submission to your instructor,

you hand copy your essays and retain those copies that you can reference when you receive

instructor feedback.

Reflective Letter: When you submit your last batch of course work for grading, you must include a

reflective essay of 500 words focused on how your studies this semester have specifically informed

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your writing and research processes, as well as the final essays. This reflective essay should also detail

the changes you would have made to each of your essays if you had the opportunity for another

revision. These changes will reflect your attention to the following categories:

· Rhetorical Situation: Topic, Purpose, Audience, Context, Angle

· Thesis

· Evidence-Based Support and Development of Claims

· Essay Structure: Introduction, Body Organization, and Essay Cohesion

· Genres that you have studied and used this term

· Research Processes

· Source Integration & Documentation (use of MLA)

· Grammar, Sentence Structures, and Punctuation

· Vocabulary and Word Choice

Misc. Writings:

Throughout the course of the semester, you will be assigned various smaller writing assignments.

These writings will supplement reading, initiate discussion, as well as provide writing practice. All

writing assignments must be formatted per MLA.

Attendance/Participation:

Due to this class taking place through a distance learning method, it is your responsibility to make sure you

are reading through all the materials you are given for the class in order to complete each step. This will be a

7-week class. Each week will consist of an instructional video where the instructor introduces concepts and

materials that pertain to the week you are in. This instruction will be supplemented by the activities and

additional materials provided in the course packet. You should read through and complete all of the work

contained in the course packet to successfully complete the course. By completing the activities and smaller

writing assignments each week you will earn your participation points.

Homework will be collected in various “batches”. The dates that work will be collected are as

follows: July 15th, July 29th, August 10th, August 21st.

Course Grading:

● 30% Essays = 100 pts. x 3 essays= 300 points

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● 30% Portfolio = 300 points

● 20% Misc. Papers = 200 points

● 14% Attendance/Participation= 140 points

● 6.0% Proof Reading, 20 points each essay = 60 points

100% in total or 1000 points

Your class grade reflects your participation, performance, and growth in the class as evidenced by

the strengthening and extension of writing and communication skills, preparation and timeliness

regarding assignments and activities, and a marked level of responsibility and concern for positive

personal and collective learning experiences. I grade on a 4.0 scale with 4.0 being excellent. You

must achieve a 2.0 in this class to pass. Less than a 2.0 will not transfer for credit or serve as a

prerequisite for another course. Percentage Conversions are as follows.

● 94 – 100 4.0 (A)

● 88 – 93 3.5 (B+)

● 83 – 87 3.0 (B)

● 78 – 82 2.5 (C+)

● 72 – 77 2.0 (C)

● 66 – 71 1.5 (D+)

● 60 – 65 1.0 (D)

● 55 – 59 0.5 (D-)

● Below 590.0

The Incomplete Grade:

In accordance with JCC policy, an Incomplete or “I” grade is only issued to students who have

demonstrated good standing in the class and hold a passing grade at the time of an extenuating

circumstance that precludes completion of the class. Documentation validating the circumstance

may be required.

Academic Honesty Policy:

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Academic Honesty is defined as ethical behavior that includes student production of their own work

and not representing others' work as their own, by cheating or by helping others to do so.

Plagiarism is defined as the failure to give credit for the use of material from outside

sources. Plagiarism includes but is not limited to:

1. Submitting other's work as your own

2. Using data, illustrations, pictures, quotations, or paraphrases from other sources without

adequate documentation

3. Reusing significant, identical or nearly identical portions of one’s own prior work without

acknowledging that one is doing so or without citing this original work (self-plagiarism)

Cheating is defined as obtaining answers/material from an outside source without

authorization. Cheating includes, but is not limited to:

1. Plagiarizing in any form

2. Using notes/books/electronic material without authorization

3. Copying

4. Submitting others' work as your own or submitting your work for others

5. Altering graded work

6. Falsifying data

7. Exhibiting other behaviors generally considered unethical

8. Allowing your work to be submitted by others

Missed/Late Assignments: In general, you cannot submit late assignments because the

course does not allow for it. Similarly, your final essay and reflection letter will be due the last week

of class, so it is impossible to submit it late.

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Calendar of Class Activities and Assignments

*Dates and assignments are subject to change based on instructor’s discretion*

Introductions Week 1 –July 6th

In-class Agenda

Introduction to class

Individual introductions

Icebreaker

Read through syllabus & calendar

Freewrite/discuss:

Writing process and genres

HOMEWORK:

Read

Ch. 1, 2, and 3 in Writing Today

Write

● Think about incidents in your life that have left scars, whether physical or emotional/mental.

Write for 10 uninterrupted minutes. Keep this to hand in with the first round of homework

pickup.

● Three possible memories/experiences to write about for your Memoir essay

Unit One-Memoir Week 2 – July 13th

In-class Agenda

Share writing (Scars prompt)

Audience/Purpose statements

Essay 1 Assignment – Memoir

Significance

Showing versus telling

Group activity – storytelling

Freewrite/discuss:

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Write for 10 uninterrupted minutes about the most significant moment of change in your life. Ex: birth

of your child, the death of your parent, a valuable lesson learned, etc., Keep this to hand in with the

first round of homework pickup.

HOMEWORK:

Read

Ch. 4 Memoir & Joan Didion’s “After Life”

Write

● 150-200 words on 3 physical objects that you hold dear or have held dear at some point in your

life. (include word count) Keep this to hand in with the first round of homework pickup.

Select

• Topic for your memoir

• Construct a draft, concept map, or brainstorm ideas for your memoir (see pg. 51 in Writing Today

for a visual of a concept map)-hand in with your first round of homework pickup

• Audience/Purpose statements for Essay 1 (Who is your intended audience? What is your purpose

in writing this memoir?)

• Begin first draft of Essay 1-you will use this for a peer editing exercise next class so make sure

you have a complete draft

• Bring all this to class and be prepared to discuss !

Unit One-Memoir cont’d Week 3 – July 20th

In-class Agenda

Share 3 physical objects prompt

Proofreading exercise using First Draft of Essay 1

In class writing – Show Don’t Tell Activity (in course pack)

Essay 2 assignment – Profile

Freewrite/discuss:

Make a list of what you accomplished in your first essay. Reflect on areas you could have expanded on

and where you might look to revise for the next draft of Essay 1.

HOMEWORK:

Read

Ch. 5 Profiles pgs. 63-73, 76-81. Answer questions 1, 2, 3 and 4 on pg. 81, first section-be ready to hand

these in with the next round of homework pickup!

Write

• Complete Second Draft of Essay 1-hand in with the next round of homework pickup

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• 500 words on three potential people you might write your profile about. Include a reflection on

why you selected these individuals and how they have influenced you. Keep this to hand in with

the next round of homework pickup.

Unit Two-Profile Week 4 – July 27th

In-Class Agenda

Share 3 most influential people prompt

12 Interview Questions

Diction/Voice

The Five W’s

Practice conducting an interview in class

Freewrite/discuss:

• Who is someone who has positively influenced you? Why?

• Pre-writing of your choice (freewrite, outline, concept map, brainstorming) for Essay 2

HOMEWORK:

Read

Profile Example-pg. 622, David Grohl and the Foo Fighters

Write

• Select the subject of your profile

• 12 interview questions

• Complete first draft of Essay 2. Bring a copy to next class.


in writing this profile?)

Interview

• Person of your choice and write down details as they happen. Be sure to include direct quotes to

accurately capture the voice/diction of your subject! Keep this to hand in with the next round of

homework pickup.

Unit Two-Profile Week 5-August 3rd

In-Class Agenda

Proofreading Exercise using First Draft of Essay 2

Asking research questions

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Essay 3-Report

Sections to include in report

Brainstorming topics

Portfolio guidelines

Freewrite/discuss:

500 word free write on three potential topics for Essay 3. Hand in with next home

HOMEWORK:

Read

Chapter 12, pgs. 265-302. Pay special attention to the report examples at the end of the chapter.

Write

● Complete draft of Essay 2 to be handed in with the next batch of homework pickup

● Draw up an outline of your report. Include the following section headings: summary/abstract,

introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion, Works Cited

● Fill out Jackson College Research Request Forms to hand in with the next batch of

homework pickup.

Unit Three-Report Week 6 – August 10th

In-Class Agenda

Discuss and share your chosen subject for the report

Sample report-Tulsa Race Riot

Angle/Purpose group discussion of sample report

What info should you include in a report?

MLA Works Cited Page

MLA group practice exercise

Freewrite/Discuss

What would you like to learn more about? Why?

If you could time travel to any time in history which time would it be? Why?

HOMEWORK:

Read

Sample Report-Karatzas' Interpreting Violence: The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot and its Legacy

Ch. 24, 26, 27 (466-473) (491-501) (504-527) *you can skim Ch. 27*

Write

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• First draft of Essay 3


in writing this profile?)

• Be ready to complete your peer review exercise for Essay 3

Unit Three-Report Week 7 – August 17th

In-Class Agenda

Proofreading Exercise using First Draft of Essay 3

“Mixtape” assignment

Compile your portfolio

Freewrite/Discuss:

Where did you grow as a writer this term?

What would you still like to refine, as far as your writing goes?

HOMEWORK:

Write

• Complete second draft of Essay 3 to hand in with final homework pickup

• Complete “Mixtape” assignment to be included as the Dedications page of your portfolio

• Reflective letter due with Essay 3-this will complete your writing portfolio!

Thank you for all your hard work this term!

Dear Student of ENG 131,

I hope you are well and eager for a semester of learning and growth as you develop and hone your writing skills in this

class. In the following pages you will find all of the materials you need to complete your coursework successfully. Before

you peruse this material please thoroughly read through the syllabus that accompanies this packet. You will find all of

the course information, as well as the course calendar, in the syllabus. As we are using a distance learning model, it’s

important that you following along week-by-week in order to stay current with your assignments and readings. The

course should settle into a rhythm once you start to get a feel for the content and the design. I hope you will enjoy the

materials and the classroom discussions and peer work that you will complete. Have a great term!

Best,

Ms. Taylor

Unit One-Memoir

Essay #1

Memoir

Due: Week of July 20th, submit with all other assignments from this unit

Assignment: Memoir is a form of writing that asks you to answer a question, tell a

story, and draw from your memory bank to do so. In this assignment you are asked to write to a central question or theme. Consider your audience (beyond me, the instructor). Compose a compelling and well-thought out essay that illustrates a life

experience that has helped clarify/explained/taught you. I want to see not only what it has taught you, but how and why.

To begin preparing for this essay you may find it helpful to freewrite about a specific memory you have that still leaves you wondering, asking questions, or that affected and/or changed you. Unique in form, this essay asks you to speak in your own voice and

use your life experience to personally narrate a topic of your choosing. You will read examples of this form to help prepare you to write your own memoir essay.

Page Requirements: 3-5 pages in length, double spaced, 12 pt font, MLA Format,

with a cover page containing the following:

A title of your choosing (that relates to the essay’s content)

Your name

Instructor’s name

Date

Assignment

Grading Guidelines: The A essay will satisfy all the requirements for the assignment in a manner that is surprising and memorable. This level of

writing will be compelling, well-composed, descriptive, and self-reflective.

Your work will be tightly edited and clearly written.

The B essay will satisfy most if not all the requirements. The essay will be

thoughtful and will touch upon all the points outlined in the assignment.

Your work will demonstrate that you took time to read it over and edit for

small errors.

The C essay will satisfy some of the requirements. It will show a clear

attempt to satisfy the assignment and may require additional points to help

clarify. It may contain small typographical errors and may contain room for

improvement.

The D essay will show a lack of effort and won’t meet the basic expectations

for the assignment. It will indicate room for a great deal of improvement. It

will contain a distracting level of typographical errors.

50%-contains a clear theme, voice, and style written in the memoir form

30%-compelling, clarified writing, shows self-reflection, awareness of

audience

20%-mechanics such as spelling, grammar, MLA compliant

100 pts.

Taken from OWL Purdue Online Writing Lab:

“The first key element of nonfiction—perhaps the most crucial thing— is that the genre relies on the author’s ability to retell events that actually happened. The talented CNF

writer will certainly use imagination and craft to relay what has happened and tell a

story, but the story must be true. You may have heard the idiom that “truth is stranger

than fiction;” this is an essential part of the genre. Events—coincidences, love stories,

stories of loss—that may be expected or feel clichéd in fiction can be respected when they occur in real life.

A writer of Creative Nonfiction should always be on the lookout for material

that can yield an essay; the world at-large is their subject matter. Additionally,

because Creative Nonfiction is focused on reality, it relies on research to render events

as accurately as possible. While it’s certainly true that fiction writers also research

their subjects (especially in the case of historical fiction), CNF writers must be

scrupulous in their attention to detail. Their work is somewhat akin to that of a journalist, and in fact, some journalism can fall under the umbrella of CNF as well.

Writer Christopher Cokinos claims, “done correctly, lived well, delivered elegantly,

such research uncovers not only facts of the world, but reveals and shapes the world of

the writer” (93). In addition to traditional research methods, such as interviewing

subjects or conducting database searches, he relays Kate Bernheimer’s claim that “A

lifetime of reading is research:” any lived experience, even one that is read, can

become material for the writer.

The other key element, the thing present in all successful nonfiction, is reflection.

A person could have lived the most interesting life and had experiences completely

unique to them, but without context—without reflection on how this life of experiences

affected the writer—the reader is left with the feeling that the writer hasn’t learned

anything, that the writer hasn’t grown. We need to see how the writer has grown

because a large part of nonfiction’s appeal is the lessons it offers us, the models for

ways of living: that the writer can survive a difficult or strange experience and learn from it. Sean Ironman writes that while “[r]eflection, or the second ‘I,’ is taught in

every nonfiction course” (43), writers often find it incredibly hard to actually include

reflection in their work. He expresses his frustration that “Students are stuck on the

idea—an idea that’s not entirely wrong—that readers need to think” (43), that

reflecting in their work would over-explain the ideas to the reader. Not so. Instead,

reflection offers “the crucial scene of the writer writing the memoir” (44), of the

present-day writer who is looking back on and retelling the past. In a moment of reflection, the author steps out of the story to show a different kind of scene, in which

they are sitting at their computer or with their notebook in some quiet place, looking at

where they are now, versus where they were then; thinking critically about what

they’ve learned. This should ideally happen in small moments, maybe single sentences,

interspersed throughout the piece. Without reflection, you have a collection of scenes

open for interpretation—though they might add up to nothing.”

“A memoir should have some uplifting quality, inspiring or illuminating, and that's what

separates a life story that can influence other people.”-Mitch Albom

“By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In

order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes.” -Caroline Knapp

Your name: _____________________________

Your partner’s name: _________________________ (their paper is being reviewed)

Peer Review Exercise for Memoir-10 points (two reviews=20 points)

Step 1: Read your partner’s draft to yourself. You should be actively reading, which means:

a) adding questions in the margins for areas that need further clarification (in pencil)

b) correcting grammar/spelling/mechanical errors that you notice

c) check-marking areas that are key to your reading or offer clarity

d) asking questions if you didn’t understand something

Step 2: List three aspects that are working well. Be specific and provide examples as needed:

1)

2)

3)

Step 3: List three aspects that could use further clarification or development. These could also be

areas where you had questions or wanted more information. Be sure to identify to your partner

where in the text you are referring to:

1)

2)

3)

Step 4: Draft a half-letter to your partner explaining your experience of reading their work. Be sure

to sandwich your feedback (praise, constructive criticism, praise). This creates a sense of balance-

remember feedback and review are meant to be positive, collaborative experiences. *Make sure to

use this entire space to receive full credit!*

___Dear______________,________________________________________________________

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______________________Sincerely,________________________________________________

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Your name: _____________________________


Peer Review Exercise for Memoir-10 points (two reviews=20 points)







3)

4)

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___Dear______________,________________________________________________________

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______________________Sincerely,________________________________________________

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Week 2-Memoir

After Life By Joan Didion

Published in The New York Times Magazine

• Sept. 25, 2005

1.

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft

Word file ("Notes on change.doc") reads "May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.," but that would have been

a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no

changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January

2004, a day or two or three after the fact.

For a long time I wrote nothing else.

Life changes in the instant.

The ordinary instant.

At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had

happened, I considered adding those words, "the ordinary instant." I saw immediately that there

would be no need to add the word "ordinary," because there would be no forgetting it: the word

never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that

prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.

I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster, we all

focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear

blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in

flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the

ivy. "He was on his way home from work -- happy, successful, healthy -- and then, gone," I read

in the account of a psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident. In 1966 I

happened to interview many people who were living in Honolulu on the morning of December 7,

1941; without exception, these people began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what

an "ordinary Sunday morning" it had been. "It was just an ordinary beautiful September day,"

people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11

and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11

Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note:

"Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United

States."

"And then -- gone." In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside. Later

I realized that I must have repeated the details of what happened to everyone who came to the

house in those first weeks, all those friends and relatives who brought food and made drinks and

laid out plates on the dining-room table for however many people were around at lunch or

dinner, all those who picked up the plates and froze the leftovers and ran the dishwasher and

filled our (I could not yet think my) otherwise empty apartment even after I had gone into the

bedroom (our bedroom, the one in which there still lay on a sofa a faded terry-cloth XL robe

bought in the 1970's at Richard Carroll in Beverly Hills) and shut the door. Those moments when

I was abruptly overtaken by exhaustion are what I remember most clearly about the first days

and weeks. I have no memory of telling anyone the details, but I must have done so, because

everyone seemed to know them. At one point I considered the possibility that they had picked up

the details of the story from one another, but immediately rejected it: the story they had was in

each instance too accurate to have been passed from hand to hand. It had come from me.

Another reason I knew that the story had come from me was that no version I heard included the

details I could not yet face, for example the blood on the living-room floor that stayed there until

José came in the next morning and cleaned it up.

José. Who was part of our household. Who was supposed to be flying to Las Vegas later that

day, December 31, but never went. José was crying that morning as he cleaned up the blood.

When I first told him what had happened, he had not understood. Clearly I was not the ideal

teller of this story, something about my version had been at once too offhand and too elliptical,

something in my tone had failed to convey the central fact in the situation (I would encounter the

same failure later when I had to tell our daughter, Quintana), but by the time José saw the blood,

he understood.

I had picked up the abandoned syringes and ECG electrodes before he came in that morning, but

I could not face the blood. IN OUTLINE.

It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004.

Nine months and five days ago, at approximately 9 o'clock on the evening of December 30,

2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he

and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden

massive coronary event that caused his death. Our only child, Quintana, then 37, had been for the

previous five nights unconscious in an intensive-care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center's Singer

Division, at that time a hospital on East End Avenue (it closed in August 2004), more commonly

known as "Beth Israel North" or "the old Doctors' Hospital," where what had seemed a case of

December flu sufficiently severe to take her to an emergency room on Christmas morning had

exploded into pneumonia and septic shock. This is my attempt to make sense of the period that

followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about

illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and

memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life

ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to

be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and

sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed

behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet

this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped

with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of

time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the

takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case

in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it

is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

2.

December 30, 2003, a Tuesday.

We had seen Quintana in the sixth-floor I.C.U. at Beth Israel North.

We had come home.

We had discussed whether to go out for dinner or eat in.

I said I would build a fire, we could eat in.

I built the fire, I started dinner, I asked John if he wanted a drink.

I got him a Scotch and gave it to him in the living room, where he was reading in the chair by the

fire where he habitually sat.

The book he was reading was by David Fromkin, a bound galley of "Europe's Last Summer:

Who Started the Great War in 1914?"

I finished getting dinner. I set the table in the living room where, when we were home alone, we

could eat within sight of the fire. I find myself stressing the fire because fires were important to

us. I grew up in California, John and I lived there together for 24 years, in California we heated

our houses by building fires. We built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in.

Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night. I lighted the

candles. John asked for a second drink before sitting down. I gave it to him. We sat down. My

attention was on mixing the salad.

John was talking, then he wasn't.

At one point in the seconds or minute before he stopped talking he had asked me if I had used

single-malt Scotch for his second drink. I had said no, I used the same Scotch I had used for his

first drink. "Good," he had said. "I don't know why but I don't think you should mix them." At

another point in those seconds or that minute he had been talking about why World War I was

the critical event from which the entire rest of the 20th century flowed.

I have no idea which subject we were on, the Scotch or World War I, at the instant he stopped

talking.

I only remember looking up. His left hand was raised and he was slumped motionless. At first I

thought he was making a failed joke, an attempt to make the difficulty of the day seem

manageable.

I remember saying, Don't do that.

When he did not respond my first thought was that he had started to eat and choked. I remember

trying to lift him far enough from the back of the chair to give him the Heimlich. I remember the

sense of his weight as he fell forward, first against the table, then to the floor. In the kitchen by

the telephone I had taped a card with the New York-Presbyterian ambulance numbers. I had not

taped the numbers by the telephone because I anticipated a moment like this. I had taped the

numbers by the telephone in case someone in the building needed an ambulance. Someone else.

I called one of the numbers. A dispatcher asked if he was breathing. I said, Just come. When the

paramedics came I tried to tell them what had happened, but before I could finish they had

transformed the part of the living room where John lay into an emergency department. One of

them (there were three, maybe four, even an hour later I could not have said) was talking to the

hospital about the electrocardiogram they seemed already to be transmitting. Another was

opening the first or second of what would be many syringes for injection. (Epinephrine?

Lidocaine? Procainamide? The names came to mind but I had no idea from where.) I remember

saying that he might have choked. This was dismissed with a finger swipe: the airway was clear.

They seemed now to be using defibrillating paddles, an attempt to restore a rhythm. They got

something that could have been a normal heartbeat (or I thought they did, we had all been silent,

there was a sharp jump), then lost it, and started again.

"He's still fibbing," I remember the one on the telephone saying.

"V-fibbing," John's cardiologist said the next morning when he called from Nantucket. "They

would have said, 'V-fibbing.' V for ventricular."

Maybe they said "V-fibbing" and maybe they did not. Atrial fibrillation did not immediately or

necessarily cause cardiac arrest. Ventricular did. Maybe ventricular was the given.

I remember trying to straighten out in my mind what would happen next. Since there was an

ambulance crew in the living room, the next logical step would be going to the hospital. It

occurred to me that the crew could decide very suddenly to go to the hospital and I would not be

ready. I would not have in hand what I needed to take. I would waste time, get left behind. I

found my handbag and a set of keys and a summary John's doctor had made of his medical

history. When I got back to the living room the paramedics were watching the computer monitor

they had set up on the floor. I could not see the monitor, so I watched their faces. I remember one

glancing at the others.

When the decision was made to move it happened very fast. I followed them to the elevator and

asked if I could go with them. They said they were taking the gurney down first, I could go in the

second ambulance. One of them waited with me for the elevator to come back up. By the time he

and I got into the second ambulance, the ambulance carrying the gurney was pulling away from

the front of the building. The distance from our building to the part of New York-Presbyterian

that used to be New York Hospital is six crosstown blocks. I have no memory of sirens. I have

no memory of traffic. When we arrived at the emergency entrance to the hospital the gurney was

already disappearing into the building. A man was waiting in the driveway. Everyone else in

sight was wearing scrubs. He was not. "Is this the wife?" he said to the driver, then turned to me.

"I'm your social worker," he said, and I guess that is when I must have known.

"I opened the door and I seen the man in the dress greens and I knew. I immediately knew." This

was what the mother of a 19-year-old killed by a bomb in Kirkuk said in a documentary

produced by The New York Times and HBO, quoted by Bob Herbert on the morning of

November 12, 2004. "But I thought that if, as long as I didn't let him in, he couldn't tell me. And

then it -- none of that would've happened. So he kept saying, 'Ma'am, I need to come in.' And I

kept telling him, 'I'm sorry, but you can't come in."'

When I read this at breakfast almost 11 months after the night with the ambulance and the social

worker, I recognized the thinking as my own.

Inside the emergency room I could see the gurney being pushed into a cubicle, propelled by

more people in scrubs. Someone told me to wait in the reception area. I did. There was a line for

admittance paperwork. Waiting in the line seemed the constructive thing to do. Waiting in the

line said that there was still time to deal with this, I had copies of the insurance cards in my

handbag, this was not a hospital I had ever negotiated -- New York Hospital was the Cornell part

of New York-Presbyterian, the part I knew was the Columbia part, Columbia-Presbyterian, at

168th and Broadway, 20 minutes away at best, too far in this kind of emergency -- but I could

make this unfamiliar hospital work, I could be useful, I could arrange the transfer to Columbia-

Presbyterian once he was stabilized. I was fixed on the details of this imminent transfer to

Columbia (he would need a bed with telemetry, eventually I could also get Quintana transferred

to Columbia, the night she was admitted to Beth Israel North I had written on a card the beeper

numbers of several Columbia doctors, one or another of them could make all this happen) when

the social worker reappeared and guided me from the paperwork line into an empty room off the

reception area. "You can wait here," he said. I waited. The room was cold, or I was. I wondered

how much time had passed between the time I called the ambulance and the arrival of the

paramedics. It had seemed no time at all (a mote in the eye of God was the phrase that came to

me in the room off the reception area), but it must have been at the minimum several minutes.

I used to have on a bulletin board in my office, for reasons having to do with a plot point in a

movie, a pink index card on which I had typed a sentence from "The Merck Manual" about how

long the brain can be deprived of oxygen. The image of the pink index card was coming back to

me in the room off the reception area: "Tissue anoxia for > 4 to 6 min. can result in irreversible

brain damage or death." I was telling myself that I must be misremembering the sentence when

the social worker reappeared. He had with him a man he introduced as "your husband's doctor."

There was a silence. "He's dead, isn't he," I heard myself say to the doctor. The doctor looked at

the social worker. "It's O.K.," the social worker said. "She's a pretty cool customer." They took

me into the curtained cubicle where John lay, alone now. They asked if I wanted a priest. I said

yes. A priest appeared and said the words. I thanked him. They gave me the silver clip in which

John kept his driver's license and credit cards. They gave me the cash that had been in his pocket.

They gave me his watch. They gave me his cellphone. They gave me a plastic bag in which they

said I would find his clothes. I thanked them. The social worker asked if he could do anything

more for me. I said he could put me in a taxi. He did. I thanked him. "Do you have money for the

fare?" he asked. I said I did, the cool customer. When I walked into the apartment and saw John's

jacket and scarf still lying on the chair where he had dropped them when we came in from seeing

Quintana at Beth Israel North (the red cashmere scarf, the Patagonia windbreaker that had been

the crew jacket on "Up Close and Personal"), I wondered what an uncool customer would be

allowed to do. Break down? Require sedation? Scream?

I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John.

There was nothing I did not discuss with John.

Because we were both writers and both worked at home, our days were filled with the sound of

each other's voices.

I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the

person the other trusted. There was no separation between our investments or interests in any

given situation. Many people assumed that we must be, since sometimes one and sometimes the

other would get the better review, the bigger advance, in some way "competitive," that our

private life must be a minefield of professional envies and resentments. This was so far from the

case that the general insistence on it came to suggest certain lacunae in the popular

understanding of marriage.

That had been one more thing we discussed.

What I remember about the apartment the night I came home alone from New York Hospital was

its silence.

In the plastic bag I had been given at the hospital there were a pair of corduroy pants, a wool

shirt, a belt and I think nothing else. The legs of the corduroy pants had been slit open, I

supposed by the paramedics. There was blood on the shirt. The belt was braided. I remember

putting his cellphone in the charger on his desk. I remember putting his silver clip in the box in

the bedroom in which we kept passports and birth certificates and proof of jury service. I look

now at the clip and see that these were the cards he was carrying: a New York State driver's

license, due for renewal on May 25, 2004; a Chase A.T.M. card; an American Express card; a

Wells Fargo MasterCard; a Metropolitan Museum card; a Writers Guild of America, West, card

(it was the season before Academy voting, when you could use a W.G.A.W. card to see movies

free, he must have gone to a movie, I did not remember); a Medicare card; a MetroCard; and a

card issued by Medtronic with the legend "I have a Kappa 900 SR pacemaker implanted," the

serial number of the device, a number to call for the doctor who implanted it and the notation

"Implant Date: 03 Jun 2003." I remember combining the cash that had been in his pocket with

the cash in my own bag, smoothing the bills, taking special care to interleaf twenties with

twenties, tens with tens, fives and ones with fives and ones. I remember thinking as I did this that

he would see that I was handling things.

When I saw him in the curtained cubicle in the emergency room at New York Hospital there was

a chip in one of his front teeth, I supposed from the fall, since there were also bruises on his face.

When I identified his body the next day for the undertaker the bruises were not apparent. It

occurred to me that masking the bruises must have been what the undertaker meant when I said

no embalming and he said, "In that case we'll just clean him up." The part with the undertaker

remains remote. I had arrived to meet him so determined to avoid any inappropriate response

(tears, anger, helpless laughter at the Oz-like hush) that I had shut down all response. After my

mother died the undertaker who picked up her body left in its place on the bed an artificial rose.

My brother had told me this, offended to the core. I would be armed against artificial roses. I

remember making a brisk decision about a coffin. I remember that in the office where I signed

the papers there was a grandfather clock, not running. John's nephew Tony, who was with me,

mentioned to the undertaker that the clock was not running. The undertaker, as if pleased to

elucidate a decorative element, explained that the clock had not run in some years but was

retained as "a kind of memorial" to a previous incarnation of the firm. He seemed to be offering

the clock as a lesson. I concentrated on Quintana. I could shut out what the undertaker was

saying, but I could not shut out the lines I was hearing as I concentrated on Quintana: Full

fathom five thy father lies.. . .Those are pearls that were his eyes.

3.

Eight months later I asked the manager of our apartment building if he still had the log kept by

the doormen for the night of December 30. I knew there was a log, I had been for three years

president of the board of the building, the door log was intrinsic to building procedure. The next

day the manager sent me the page for December 30. According to the log, the doormen that night

were Michael Flynn and Vasile Ionescu. I had not remembered that. Vasile Ionescu and John had

a routine with which they amused themselves in the elevator, a small game, between an exile

from Ceaucescu's Romania and an Irish Catholic from West Hartford, Conn., based on a shared

appreciation of political posturing. "So where is bin Laden?" Vasile would say when John got

onto the elevator, the point being to come up with ever more improbable suggestions: "Could bin

Laden be in the penthouse?" "In the maisonette?" "In the fitness room?" When I saw Vasile's

name on the log, it occurred to me that I could not remember if he had initiated this game when

we came in from Beth Israel North in the early evening of December 30. The log for that evening

showed only two entries, fewer than usual, even for a time of the year when most people in the

building left for more clement venues: "NOTE: -- Paramedics arrived at 9:20 p.m. for Mr.

Dunne. Mr. Dunne was taken to hospital at 10:05 p.m. NOTE: -- Light bulb out on A-B

passenger elevator."

The A-B elevator was our elevator, the elevator in which the paramedics came up at 9:20 p.m.,

the elevator in which they took John (and me) downstairs to the ambulance at 10:05 p.m., the

elevator in which I returned alone to our apartment at a time not noted. I had not noticed a light

bulb being out in the elevator. Nor had I noticed that the paramedics were in the apartment for 45

minutes. I had always described it as "15 or 20 minutes." If they were here that long does it mean

that he was alive? I put this question to a doctor I knew. "Sometimes they'll work that long," he

said. It was a while before I realized that this in no way addressed the question.

The Death certificate, when I got it, gave the time of death as 10:18 p.m., December 30, 2003.

I had been asked before I left the hospital if I would authorize an autopsy. I had said yes. I later

read that asking a survivor to authorize an autopsy is seen in hospitals as delicate, sensitive, often

the most difficult of the routine steps that follow a death. Doctors themselves, according to many

studies (for example, Katz, J., and Gardner, R., "The Intern's Dilemma: The Request for Autopsy

Consent," Psychiatry in Medicine 3:197203, 1972), experience considerable anxiety about

making the request. They know that autopsy is essential to the learning and teaching of medicine,

but they also know that the procedure touches a primitive dread. If whoever it was at New York

Hospital who asked me to authorize an autopsy experienced such anxiety, I could have spared

him or her: I actively wanted an autopsy. I actively wanted an autopsy even though I had seen

some, in the course of doing research. I knew exactly what occurred, the chest open like a

chicken in a butcher's case, the face peeled down, the scale on which the organs are weighed. I

had seen homicide detectives avert their eyes from an autopsy in progress. I still wanted one. I

needed to know how and why and when it had happened. In fact I wanted to be in the room when

they did it (I had watched those other autopsies with John, I owed him his own, it was fixed in

my mind at that moment that he would be in the room if I were on the table), but I did not trust

myself to rationally present the point so I did not ask.

If the ambulance left our building at 10:05 p.m., and death was declared at 10:18 p.m., the 13

minutes in between were just bookkeeping, bureaucracy, making sure the hospital procedures

were observed and the paperwork was done and the appropriate person was on hand to do the

sign-off, inform the cool customer.

The sign-off, I later learned, was called the "pronouncement," as in "Pronounced: 10:18 p.m."

I had to believe he was dead all along.

If I did not believe he was dead all along I would have thought I should have been able to save

him.

Until I saw the autopsy report I continued to think this anyway, an example of delusionary

thinking, the omnipotent variety.

A week or two before he died, when we were having dinner in a restaurant, John asked me to

write something in my notebook for him. He always carried cards on which to make notes, three-

by-six-inch cards printed with his name that could be slipped into an inside pocket. At dinner he

had thought of something he wanted to remember, but when he looked in his pockets he found

no cards. I need you to write something down, he said. It was, he said, for his new book, not for

mine, a point he stressed because I was at the time researching a book that involved sports. This

was the note he dictated: "Coaches used to go out after a game and say, 'You played great.' Now

they go out with state police, as if this were a war and they the military. The militarization of

sports." When I gave him the note the next day, he said, "You can use it if you want to."

What did he mean?

Did he know he would not write the book?

Did he have some apprehension, a shadow? Why had he forgotten to bring note cards to dinner

that night? Had he not warned me when I forgot my own notebook that the ability to make a note

when something came to mind was the difference between being able to write and not being able

to write? Was something telling him that night that the time for being able to write was running

out?

One summer when we were living in Brentwood Park we fell into a pattern of stopping work at 4

in the afternoon and going out to the pool. He would stand in the water reading (he reread

"Sophie's Choice" several times that summer, trying to see how it worked) while I worked in the

garden. It was a small, even miniature, garden with gravel paths and a rose arbor and beds edged

with thyme and santolina and feverfew. I had convinced John a few years before that we should

tear out a lawn to plant this garden. To my surprise, since he had shown no previous interest in

gardens, he regarded the finished product as an almost mystical gift. Just before 5 on those

summer afternoons we would swim and then go into the library wrapped in towels to watch

"Tenko," a BBC series, then in syndication, about a number of satisfyingly predictable English

women (one was immature and selfish, another seemed to have been written with Mrs. Miniver

in mind) imprisoned by the Japanese in Malaya during World War II. After each afternoon's

"Tenko" segment we would go upstairs and work another hour or two, John in his office at the

top of the stairs, me in the glassed-in porch across the hall that had become my office. At 7 or

7:30 we would go out to dinner, many nights at Morton's. Morton's felt right that summer. There

was always shrimp quesadilla, chicken with black beans. There was always someone we knew.

The room was cool and polished and dark inside but you could see the twilight outside.

John did not like driving at night by then. This was one reason, I later learned, that he wanted to

spend more time in New York, a wish that at the time remained mysterious to me. One night that

summer he asked me to drive home after dinner at Anthea Sylbert's house on Camino Palmero in

Hollywood. I remember thinking how remarkable this was. Anthea lived less than a block from

the house on Franklin Avenue in which we had lived from 1967 until 1971, so it was not a

question of reconnoitering a new neighborhood. It had occurred to me as I started the ignition

that I could count on my fingers the number of times I had driven when John was in the car; the

single other time I could remember that night was once spelling him on a drive from Las Vegas

to Los Angeles. He had been dozing in the passenger seat of the Corvette we then had. He had

opened his eyes. After a moment he had said, very carefully, "I might take it a little slower." I

had no sense of unusual speed and glanced at the speedometer: I was doing 120.

Yet.

A drive across the Mojave was one thing. There was no previous time when he asked me to drive

home from dinner in town: this evening on Camino Palmero was unprecedented. So was the fact

that at the end of the 40-minute drive to Brentwood Park, he pronounced it "well driven."

He mentioned those afternoons with the pool and the garden and "Tenko" several times during

the year before he died.

Philippe Ariès, in "The Hour of Our Death," points out that the essential characteristic of death

as it appears in the "Chanson de Roland" is that the death, even if sudden or accidental, "gives

advance warning of its arrival." Gawain is asked: "Ah, good my lord, think you then so soon to

die?" Gawain answers: "I tell you that I shall not live two days." Ariès notes: "Neither his doctor

nor his friends nor the priests (the latter are absent and forgotten) know as much about it as he.

Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left."

You sit down to dinner.

"You can use it if you want to," John had said when I gave him the note he had dictated a week

or two before.

And then -- gone.

4.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. It was not what I felt when my parents died:

my father died a few days short of his 85th birthday and my mother a month short of her 91st,

both after some years of increasing debility. What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness

(the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things

unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and

helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured. I understood the inevitability of each of

their deaths. I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life. They

remained, when they did occur, distanced, at a remove from the ongoing dailiness of my life.

After my mother died I received a letter from a friend in Chicago, a former Maryknoll priest,

who precisely intuited what I felt. The death of a parent, he wrote, "despite our preparation,

indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that

may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in

that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware

of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections."

My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I

would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry.

I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch.

I would still remember to renew my passport.

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden

apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of "waves." Erich

Lindemann, who was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940's and

interviewed many family members of those killed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, defined the

phenomenon with absolute specificity in a famous 1944 study: "sensations of somatic distress

occurring in waves lasting from 20 minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the

throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing and an empty feeling in the abdomen,

lack of muscular power and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain."

Tightness in the throat.

Choking, need for sighing.

Such waves began for me on the morning of December 31, 2003, seven or eight hours after the

fact, when I woke alone in the apartment. I do not remember crying the night before; I had

entered at the moment it happened a kind of shock in which the only thought I allowed myself

was that there must be certain things I needed to do. There had been certain things I had needed

to do while the ambulance crew was in the living room. I had needed for example to get the copy

of John's medical summary, so I could take it with me to the hospital. I had needed for example

to bank the fire, because I would be leaving it. There had been certain things I had needed to do

at the hospital. I had needed for example to stand in the line. I had needed for example to focus

on the bed with telemetry he would need for the transfer to Columbia-Presbyterian.

Once I got back from the hospital there had again been certain things I needed to do. I could not

identify all of these things, but I did know one of them: I needed, before I did anything else, to

tell John's brother Nick. It had seemed too late in the evening to call their older brother Dick on

Cape Cod (he went to bed early, his health had not been good, I did not want to wake him with

bad news) but I needed to tell Nick. I did not plan how to do this. I just sat on the bed and picked

up the phone and dialed the number of his house in Connecticut. He answered. I told him. After I

put down the phone, in what I can only describe as a new neural pattern of dialing numbers and

saying the words, I picked it up again. I could not call Quintana (she was still where we had left

her a few hours before, unconscious in the I.C.U. at Beth Israel North), but I could call Gerry,

her husband of five months, and I could call my brother, Jim, who would be at his house in

Pebble Beach. Gerry said he would come over. I said there was no need to come over, I would be

fine. Jim said he would get a flight. I said there was no need to think about a flight, we would

talk in the morning. I was trying to think what to do next when the phone rang. It was John's and

my agent, Lynn Nesbit, a friend since I suppose the late 60's. It was not clear to me at the time

how she knew but she did (it had something to do with a mutual friend to whom both Nick and

Lynn seemed in the last minute to have spoken), and she was calling from a taxi on her way to

our apartment. At one level I was relieved (Lynn knew how to manage things, Lynn would know

what it was that I was supposed to be doing) and at another I was bewildered: how could I deal at

this moment with company? What would we do, would we sit in the living room with the

syringes and the ECG electrodes and the blood still on the floor, should I rekindle what was left

of the fire, would we have a drink, would she have eaten?

Had I eaten?

The instant in which I asked myself whether I had eaten was the first intimation of what was to

come: if I thought of food, I learned that night, I would throw up.

Lynn arrived.

We sat in the part of the living room where the blood and electrodes and syringes were not.

I remember thinking as I was talking to Lynn (this was the part I could not say) that the blood

must have come from the fall: he had fallen on his face, there was the chipped tooth I had noticed

in the emergency room, the tooth could have cut the inside of his mouth.

Lynn picked up the phone and said that she was calling Christopher.

This was another bewilderment: the Christopher I knew best was in either Paris or Dubai and in

any case Lynn would have said Chris, not Christopher. I found my mind veering to the autopsy.

It could even be happening as I sat there. Then I realized that the Christopher to whom Lynn was

talking was Christopher Lehmann-Haupt at The New York Times. I remember a sense of shock.

I wanted to say not yet but my mouth had gone dry. I could deal with "autopsy" but the notion of

"obituary" had not occurred to me. "Obituary," unlike "autopsy," which was between me and

John and the hospital, meant it had happened. I found myself wondering, with no sense of illogic,

if it had also happened in Los Angeles. I was trying to work out what time it had been when he

died and whether it was that time yet in Los Angeles. (Was there time to go back? Could we

have a different ending on Pacific time?) I recall being seized by a pressing need not to let

anyone at The Los Angeles Times learn what had happened by reading it in The New York

Times. I called our closest friend at The Los Angeles Times. I have no memory of what Lynn

and I did then. I remember her saying that she would stay the night, but I said no, I would be fine

alone.

And I was.

Until the morning. When, only half awake, I tried to think why I was alone in the bed. There was

a leaden feeling. It was the same leaden feeling with which I woke on mornings after John and I

had fought. Had we had a fight? What about, how had it started, how could we fix it if I could

not remember how it started?

Then I remembered.

For several weeks that would be the way I woke to the day.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

One of several lines from different poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins that John strung together

during the months immediately after his younger brother committed suicide, a kind of

improvised rosary.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

And I have asked to be

Where no storms come.

I see now that my insistence on spending that first night alone was more complicated than it

seemed, a primitive instinct. Of course I knew John was dead. Of course I had already delivered

the definitive news to his brother and to my brother and to Quintana's husband. The New York

Times knew. The Los Angeles Times knew. Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this

news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.

That was why I needed to be alone.

After that first night I would not be alone for weeks (Jim and his wife would fly in from

California the next day, Nick would come back to town, Tony and his wife would come down

from Connecticut, José would not go to Las Vegas, our assistant Sharon would come back from

skiing, there would never not be people in the house), but I needed that first night to be alone.

I needed to be alone so that he could come back.

5.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that

someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that

immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days

or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to

be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate,

inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe

that their husband is about to return. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be

"healing." A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We

imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this

hypothetical healing will take place.

When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to "get through it," to rise to the

occasion, exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death.

We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be

able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing

that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne,

a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and

meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the

difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows,

the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we

will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

As a child I thought a great deal about meaninglessness, which seemed at the time the most

prominent negative feature on the horizon. After a few years of failing to find meaning in the

more commonly recommended venues I learned that I could find it in geology, so I did. This in

turn enabled me to find meaning in the Episcopal litany, most acutely in the words "as it was in

the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end," which I interpreted as a literal

description of the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and

mountains, the inexorable shifting of the geological structures that could throw up mountains and

islands and could just as reliably take them away. I found earthquakes, even when I was in them,

deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the scheme could

destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had

come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No one was

watching me. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. On the day

it was announced that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, those were the words

that came immediately to my 10-year-old mind. When I heard a few years later about mushroom

clouds over the Nevada test site, those were again the words that came to mind. I began waking

before dawn, imagining that the fireballs from the Nevada test shots would light up the sky in

Sacramento.

Later, after I married and had a child, I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of

domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those

soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets,

stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through

whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were

the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. That I

could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of my life as a wife and mother did not seem

inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology and the test shots; the two

systems existed for me on parallel tracks that occasionally converged, notably during

earthquakes.

In my unexamined mind there was always a point, John's and my death, at which the tracks

would converge for a final time. On the Internet I recently found aerial photographs of the house

on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in which we had lived when we were first married, the house to

which we had brought Quintana home from St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica and put her in

her bassinet by the wisteria in the box garden. The photographs, part of the California Coastal

Records Project, the point of which was to document the entire California coastline, were hard to

read conclusively, but the house as it had been when we lived in it appeared to be gone. The

tower where the gate had been seemed intact but the rest of the structure looked unfamiliar.

There seemed to be a swimming pool where the wisteria and box garden had been. The area

itself was identified as "Portuguese Bend Landslide." You could see the slumping of the hill

where the slide had occurred. You could also see, at the base of the cliff on the point, the cave

into which we used to swim when the tide was at exactly the right flow.

The swell of clear water.

That was one way my two systems could have converged.

We could have been swimming into the cave with the swell of clear water and the entire point

could have slumped, slipped into the sea around us. The entire point slipping into the sea around

us was the kind of conclusion I anticipated. I did not anticipate cardiac arrest at the dinner table.

Joan Didion is the author of 13 books, including "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "Where I

Was From." This article is adapted from "The Year of Magical Thinking," to be published by

Alfred A. Knopf next month.

Week 2-Memoir

Showing versus Telling

In class activity

You and your tablemate(s) need to revise the sentences below.

They are boring sentences that don’t describe anything, but “tell.”

The “telling” word or phrase is in italics.

For this activity, after the given sentence, provide 2-3 more

sentences with concrete details to “show” the concept in italics. In

other words, paint a word picture that would allow any reader to

visualize the scene. Don’t simply use a synonym. Instead, bring

the scene to life. Be creative and have fun!

Racquel couldn’t believe the mess her dog had made

in the kitchen.

Shane needed help with his mother’s situation.

Alex’s first day working at Best Buy was full of

strange encounters with customers.

Brittney and Dan’s roller coaster ride was very

exciting.

The concert was unbelievable.

Living away from home for the first time presented

many challenges for Tasia.

John was obnoxious at the dinner party.

Latasha needs exercise after stressful days.

Jose was thrilled with his performance at the Big

House in Ann Arbor.

This winter, California had awful weather.

Maria’s summer cold had made her feel miserable.

There are many delicious items on the Italian

restaurant’s menu.

Unit Two-Profile

Essay #2

Profile

Due: Week of August 3rd

Assignment: Profiles are meant to describe a person, place, or event within a

contained space. They aim to detail their chosen subject through a specific lens, or for a

specific reason. To this end, profiles should be self-contained pieces of writing. Keeping

in mind the examples we have read together in class, write a 3-5 page profile of your chosen subject. Remember to include relevant detail and description to illustrate your

profile; background information to help contextualize your subject; anecdotes to help

tell a story; and a central theme that unifies the writing.

Requirements: 3-5 pages (please try to stay within this length), double spaced, 12

point font, MLA format (including citations, Works Cited page if you include

information from secondary sources) with page numbers, a header, and a relevant,

creative title.

Grading Guidelines: The A essay will satisfy all the requirements for the

assignment in a manner that is surprising and memorable. This level of

writing will be compelling, well-composed, and descriptive. Your work will

be tightly edited and clearly written.

The B essay will satisfy most if not all the requirements. The essay will be thoughtful and will touch upon all the points outlined in the assignment.

Your work will demonstrate that you took the time to read it over and edit

for small errors.

The C essay will satisfy some of the requirements. It will show a clear

attempt to satisfy the assignment and may require additional points to help

clarify. It may contain typographical errors and room for improvement.

The D essay will show a lack of effort and won’t meet the basic expectations

of the assignment. It will indicate room for a great deal of improvement. It

will contain a distracting level of typographical errors.

Rubric:

Description and detail Identifies key elements of subject; includes relevant detail, description, background information, and anecdotes.

/50

Thematic Contains a central theme or idea and is written from a particular angle.

/30

Mechanics • MLA compliant

• At least 3-5 pages

• Free of spelling and grammar errors

/20

_________/100

Your name: _____________________________


Peer Review Exercise for Profile-10 points (two reviews=20 points)







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______________________Sincerely,________________________________________________

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Your name: _____________________________


Peer Review Exercise for Profile-10 points (two reviews=20 points)







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Unit Three-Report

Essay #3

Report/Research

Due: August 21st with final batch of homework pickup

Assignment: Reports require that the writer has an expressed curiosity about their

chosen subject. Reports will explicitly state their subject and seek to provide as much information as possible about them within a contained piece of writing. Reports will

choose to share information from a particular angle on a larger subject. For instance, if

you have an interest in exotic animals you might write a report on “Ownership laws for

exotic animals in Michigan”.

A successful report will demonstrate that the writer has undergone careful research of

their subject. Research serves as the body and substance of a report. Remember that

lived experience also counts as research. Be sure to attribute the information contained in your report in an ethical manner that complies with the MLA standards we have

discussed in class.

Page Requirements: 3-5 pages in length, double spaced, MLA Format, with a header

(example below), Works Cited/References page (not included in page count) and

parenthetical citations (in-text).

Your name

Instructor’s name

Date

Assignment

Grading Guidelines: The A essay will satisfy all the requirements for the assignment in a manner that is surprising and memorable. This level of writing will be compelling, well-composed, descriptive, and self-reflective. Your work will be tightly edited and clearly written.

The B essay will satisfy most if not all the requirements. The essay will be thoughtful and will touch upon all the points outlined in the assignment. Your work will demonstrate that you took time to read it over and edit for small errors.

The C essay will satisfy some of the requirements. It will show a clear attempt to satisfy the assignment and may require additional points to help clarify. It may contain small typographical errors and may contain room for improvement.

The D essay will show a lack of effort and won’t meet the basic expectations for the assignment. It will indicate room for a great deal of improvement. It will contain a distracting level of typographical errors.

50%-contains a chosen subject/topic and demonstrates research of this subject

30%-compelling, clarified writing that demonstrates awareness of your audience

20%-mechanics such as spelling, grammar, MLA compliant, Works Cited page

100 pts.

Rubric:

Identifies chosen subject and

explains it fully; contains

research and proper citations;

demonstrates knowledge of

subject.

50 points

Writing expresses awareness

of its audience; is written

from a particular angle.

30 points

Grammar, spelling, MLA

compliant; Works Cited page,

page numbers, header

20 points

_________/100

Your name: _____________________________


Peer Review Exercise for Report-10 points (two reviews=20 points)







5)

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___Dear______________,________________________________________________________

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______________________Sincerely,________________________________________________

Your name: _____________________________


Peer Review Exercise for Report-10 points (two reviews=20 points)







7)

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___Dear______________,________________________________________________________

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______________________Sincerely,________________________________________________

Mixtape: This assignment is meant to be the Dedications page for your Portfolio. A

Dedications page is meant to honor and thank the family members or friends in your

life who mean the most to you. Select 10 songs and list them, as well as the artist who

created them. Write a dedication (1-2 sentences) of who the Mixtape is thanking and

why. You will be given full points for including 10 songs/artists (10 points) and for

the subsequent Dedication section (10 points).

*This form is not for business plan research. Please use the Business Plan Research Request form instead.

GENERAL* RESEARCH REQUEST

Need sources for your assignment? Jackson College’s library staff are happy to help!

Before completing this form: If you have access to a JC laptop in your class, search the Assignment

Research Materials folder on any laptop to see if any articles match your topic, as well as the JSTOR

Index located on the instructor’s laptop. You can request any of these articles by filling out an Article

Request Form on the reverse side of this sheet. More copies are available from your instructor.

NAME: DATE:

INSTRUCTOR: CLASS:

TELL US ABOUT YOUR RESEARCH TOPIC:

WHAT ARE YOUR RESEARCH QUESTIONS?

Research is a process of asking questions. What question(s) are you trying to answer in your assignment? Write

1-3 questions below. These should be investigative questions that use words like “why?”, “how?”, “what?” and

will help us find the most appropriate materials for your project.

COMMENTS FROM THE LIBRARIAN:

Title of Article: ___________________________________________________________________

found in library research folder found in JSTOR index

Title of Journal or Book (if available): __________________________________________________

Author: __________________________________________________________________________

*We can get nearly any article through interlibrary loan, but it does take more time. If we do not have access to this exact

article through our library, could we provide you with a similar article instead?

Yes, similar would be fine No, please try to get this exact one

Jackson College Library Article Request Form (for CEP students)

Student Name:

Instructor and Class:

Jackson College Library Article Request Form (for CEP students)

Student Name:

Instructor and Class:

Title of Article: ___________________________________________________________________

found in library research folder found in JSTOR index

Title of Journal or Book (if available): __________________________________________________

Author: __________________________________________________________________________

*We can get nearly any article through interlibrary loan, but it does take more time. If we do not have access to this exact

article through our library, could we provide you with a similar article instead?

Yes, similar would be fine No, please try to get this exact one

127

EJAC 37 (2) pp. 127–140 Intellect Limited 2018

European Journal of American Culture Volume 37 Number 2

© 2018 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ejac.37.2.127_1

Keywords

TulsaraceriotwarOklahomaviolencememory

Konstantinos d. KaratzasLondon Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

interpreting violence:

the 1921 tulsa race riot

and its legacy

abstract

The article analyses aspects of the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma Race Riot and War. In the first part, it presents a brief history of Tulsa, Oklahoma and the reasons that triggered the clash that devastated Greenwood, the black part of Tulsa. The next section focuses on the role of the Red Cross in the relief project for the support of thousands of home-less African Americans, and deals with the long legal struggle for reparations and the role of the legal system in the failure to punish the guilty for the devastation of Greenwood. The last part of the article presents the controversy generated by the renaming of one of Tulsa’s main streets and the direct connection to the city’s violent and racial past. The legacy of segregation is deeply rooted in the American past; the use of the Tulsa Riot and War as a case study demonstrates the impact of racial conflicts on society and the necessity to identify and resolve relevant problems.

The United States witnessed several cases of racially motivated rioting during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Red Summer and a series of episodes of unrest that took place from Omaha to Chicago and from St. Louis to Atlanta have been at the core of several studies. However, the international bibliography has not shed adequate light upon the racial clash in Tulsa, Oklahoma and its impact on the city and its residents.

03_EJAC_37.2_Karatzas_127-140.indd 127 6/13/18 8:58 AM

Konstantinos D. Karatzas

128 European Journal of American Culture

On the 30 May 1921, the United States was celebrating Memorial Day. In Tulsa, Oklahoma people filled the roads enjoying the respite before the official beginning of summer and the last weekend before some would seek cooler climates (Hirsch 2002: 78).

Tulsa was a financially robust city and a vibrant centre of oil business. With about 1500 companies related to oil in the late 1910s, Tulsa may be consid-ered Oklahoma’s oil capital; some would see it as the oil capital of the world (Kemm 2004: 8). In 1910, the Census Survey reported 18,182 (White 1921: 909–10) residents; in 1921 the population rose to 98,874 (Comstock 1921: 460). Tulsa benefited in many ways, developing its infrastructure and offering many job opportunities.

In 1912 the highly productive Cushing Oil Field was discovered. From 1912 to 1920, it covered two-thirds of total oil production on the North American continent (Carney 1981: 8). However predictions were inaccurate and the reservoir’s production plummeted in the following years, causing major diffi-culties in the oil industry. The major surplus and Mexican oil imports caused the decline of oil prices, with an immediate effect on the industry; in an effort to limit losses, oil companies fired many of their workers. The unions, which were segregated by definition, organized strikes in order to protect the jobs of their fellow white workers. Non-white, non-union workers filled positions and at lower pay.

Despite these difficulties, Tulsa’s African American population had bene-fited from the oil boost and the financial opportunities of the previous years. Greenwood, the African American part of Tulsa, became arguably the most financially independent black community in the entire United States. Black Wall Street, as it was commonly known, was a thriving place that offered all the services of a modern city, with many educated residents, businessmen, and scientists among its residents. Benefited by its position, right next to the main train station, the area of Greenwood expanded and became self-sufficient through the years.

Before stateship in 1907, Tulsa was not segregated; through the years it transformed and followed the pattern of segregation. At first glance, the fact that white Tulsans had allowed such a powerful black neighbourhood to develop might seem to indicate a lower level of racial division in comparison to other states. However racism in Tulsa had deep roots that led to one of the worst racial clashes in the nation’s history.

Tulsa was similar to other southern states in that segregated facilities for whites and blacks were the rule. At the business centre of Tulsa, Drexler Building was the only one with restrooms for African Americans. It was Monday morning on 30 May 1921 when Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old African American bootblack accessed the elevator which the white female operator, Sarah Page, would take to the floor with the restrooms (Baird and Danney 2008: 114).

A few moments after Rowland entered the elevator, the door opened, he ran away, and Page screamed that the black man had assaulted her. It is unknown what really happened between the two of them because there were no eyewitnesses in the elevator; the most logical explanation was that Rowland stepped on her or touched her by accident. Even the police did not believe Page and thus did not arrest him.

However, the newspapers found the story interesting and spread the word about a black man who had assaulted a young white woman, without taking into account that the police report did not accuse Rowland. The Tulsa Daily


Interpreting violence

www.intellectbooks.com 129

World, which supported Page’s allegations for assault, issued an article enti-tled: ‘Nab negro for attacking girl in an elevator’, a clear motivation to lynch Rowland.

The rumour spread in Tulsa and punishment of the black man seemed imminent. Sheriff Willard McCullough even received calls from the Police and Fire Commissioner J. M. Adkison, who informed him that lynching talk was in the air (Baird and Danney 2008). The sheriff’s surprising move was to track down and detain Rowland in order to keep him alive. Despite his effort, the situation escalated rapidly. By the end of the work day white people had gathered outside the Tulsa County Courthouse jail and demanded to lynch Rowland. The area was filled with white people yelling: ‘Let us have the nigger’ (Bell 1921). Despite the growing aggression of the crowd, the sheriff was determined to protect Rowland’s life and did not allow any lynching on his shift.

However, the situation reached a climax when African Americans from Greenwood marched in front of the jail in order to prevent the lynching of their fellow citizen. It did not take long for white and black to engage but no one could predict the chaos that followed over the following hours.

In his report on the event, Walter White, the prominent civil rights activist and member of the NAACP, wrote that during the first moments ‘there was a fusillade of shots and from both sides and twelve men fell dead – two of them colored, ten white’ (1921: 909–10). The situation was in McCullough’s words, ‘just like throwing a match in the powder can’ (White 1921).

In the following hours, the mob and several members of the local armed forces collaborated to create an army of aggressive white men. Under the excuse that he needed forces in order to protect the city, Police Commissioner Adkison randomly deputized at least five hundred people. In reality, Adkison’s decision to allow Special Deputies, that is, officially authorized officers of the police force, legitimized the retaliation by white people against Greenwood by offering them weapons and the protection of police badges; ‘a great many of these persons lining the sidewalks were holding a rifle or a shotgun in one hand and grasping the neck of a liquor bottle with the other, some even had pistols stuck in their belts’ (Ellsworth 2001: 97). The process was so quick that there is no list of the deputies’ names; or else it was destroyed to cover the traces. This anonymity allowed the deputies to act with impunity; a great amount of destruction and shootings originated from this task force.

Fighting between white and black mobs continued for hours, ‘until midnight when the colored men, greatly outnumbered, were forced back to their section of the town’ (White 1921: 909–10). For some hours, there were no battles and people believed that it might be the end of the riot. Unfortunately, the next phase was more organized and far more destructive; by the end of the following day Greenwood would cease to exist.

International bibliography refers to the clash as the Tulsa race riot(s). However, this article seeks to underline the distinction between the two interconnected but also distinct phases: the riot and the war (Karatzas 2017: 11,148). The first part, the riot, consisted of spontaneous reactions, random shootings and various types of vandalism, which started outside the court-house and continued until the end of the day. Police support of the white rioters was not pre-organized and thus, in general terms, the clash resem-bled other similar riots of the era. The next stage, however, distinguishes Tulsa from other cases. It began in the early hours of the first of June 1921 and lasted for fewer than twelve hours. The riot turned into a full-scale war-like




invasion: soldiers, snipers, arson, looting, war tactics and allegations of the use of a machine gun and bombing from the air created mayhem. This phase was organized and planned by the local authorities so as to facilitate the destruc-tion of Greenwood.

The local forces consisted mainly of the Tulsa branch of the National Guard, the police, the Special Deputies and the white rioters. The critical step towards the destruction of Greenwood was the fact that garrisoned African Americans were disarmed and along with most of the residents they were convinced that the National Guard would offer them protection. Those who protected Greenwood were not only extremely outnumbered but they also lacked ammunition to tackle such an invasion. In addition, they were deceived into leaving their properties unprotected: easy prey for the white rioters. In waves, people were transferred to designated areas, not as victims but as pris-oners. However, many remained in their houses in order to protect themselves and their property.

One of the reports by a Major Daley explains the way the white rioters collaborated with the National Guard. While Daley was in the field where he saw

a mob of 150 walking in a column of squads, […] it was assembled and […] given instructions […] that if they wish to assist in maintain-ing order they must abide by instructions and follow them to the letter rather than running wild.

(Halliburton 1975: 72–73)

He also explained that

they were split up […] in groups of 12 to 20 […] with instructions to preserve order […] and to assist in gathering up all negroes;[…] no one would fire a shot unless it was to protect life after all methods had failed.

(Halliburton 1975)

Obviously, most, if not all, rioters did not follow orders. The first episodes of arson began at about one a.m. in order to disable the

black snipers. However, the final invasion started at 4 a.m., 1 June and lasted for about two hours. The evidence is not clear but the invaders of Greenwood might have been between 5000 and 10,000 in number (Ellsworth 2001: 71). After the looting, the arson continued until eventually Greenwood was almost entirely burned to the ground.

The rest of the state forces reached Tulsa only when it was too late. When the chapter of the National Guard from Oklahoma City, the state capital, arrived in Tulsa, ‘more than 5000 men had surrounded the Negro section’ (Jones Parrish 1998: 63). There was almost nothing left to save. The Tulsa Race Riot and War came to an end, with more than 1256 houses burned and 314 residences looted and robbed by the rioters (O’Dell 2001: 144). The actual damage to the 199 recorded cases was calculated between 1.5 (Jones Parrish 1998) and 1.8 million dollars (Ellsworth 1992: 72) in 1920s prices.

The day after was revealing for the future of Greenwood and its 10,000 residents. The Red Cross took up the relief effort. The humanitarian organiza-tion had organized a massive relief project that not only saved the lives of the numerous wounded and homeless people but also preserved the very exist-ence of Greenwood in Tulsa. ‘Please establish headquarters for all relief work




and bring all organizations that can assist you to your aid, the responsibility is placed in your hands entirely’ (Jones Parrish 1998: 31) wrote the mayor of Tulsa, T. D. Evans, in the telegram he sent to Red Cross headquarters on 6 June 1921. While the local and state authorities had completely abandoned the survivors, the Red Cross organized a large-scale plan in order to provide security, food, shelter, job training and placement, health coverage, and legal support for all of them; this is why most of the black population called the workers of the organization Angels of Mercy.

For the first time since its establishment, the Red Cross had to deal with a catastrophe not the result of a natural phenomenon but rather a war-like clash within the borders of the United States. The organization followed the 1907 Geneva Convention, which among other things regulated the treat-ment of prisoners of war to ensure their survival and protection of basic human rights. In detail, Article 4 of the Convention states that such pris-oners ‘must be humanely treated [and that] all their personal belongings, except arms, horses and military papers remain their property’ (Hague Convention 1907a: 2227). In addition, Article 5 contains the provision that prisoners must be interned in a town, fortress, camp or other place and forbidden to go beyond certain fixed limits (Hague Convention 1907a, 1907b: 2277); Article 7 clearly states that the government of the state in which the prisoners are found is responsible for providing them with board, lodging, and clothing on the same footing as the soldiers of the enemy state that captured them (Hague Convention 1907a, 1907b). Analysis of the arti-cles reveals that the survivors in Tulsa had all the characteristics of prisoners of war: homeless and helpless, abandoned by their home country, confined in specific areas, denied basic human rights, treated without respect and deprived of their possessions (Karatzas 2017: 252).

The Red Cross officially left Tulsa on 31 December 1921. In the seven months that the organization worked in the area, it had major accomplish-ments and avoided a humanitarian crisis. For example, it built the first hospital for black patients in the history of Oklahoma. Numerous people were treated in first aid units and most were vaccinated in order to prevent the spread of diseases connected to the difficult conditions in the camps. In addition, aid workers built the necessary infrastructure to ensure clean water, food and shelter for the homeless. The organization focused on the preservation of the social and family structure as well. It established workshops and the refugees participated in the production line so that they would be prepared to support themselves after the conclusion of the relief project.

The presence and work of the Red Cross in Tulsa underlined the unwill-ingness and incompetence of the local, state, and federal authorities to recognize and respectively solve the problem. It can also serve as an example of a successful and organized effort of a determined army of volunteers; they were colour blind, worked collectively and saved Greenwood from oblivion; there was not many buildings left to remind the glory of Greenwood but there were thousands of black people that would have abandoned Tulsa if it was not for the Red Cross. In addition, the archive of the head of the Red Cross in Tulsa, Maurice Willows, is one of the most valuable sources of information; without his contribution, the Tulsa Race Riot and War would not have been adequately documented and would mostly depend on oral tradition. Willows’ facts and figures offer compelling evidence of the magnitude of the destruction and the actual problems that faced the resi-dents of Greenwood.




In the following years, the battlefield changed and the African American community had to struggle in courtrooms for legal and ethical recognition. Despite the black community’s persistence, the orchestrated effort of the authorities left no space for vindication. The local, state and federal courts denied any claim for reparations; they blamed or charged no one for the destruction. For example, the judges did not confirm the participation of the police in the clash because they did not find any evidence that the people who were holding badges, namely the Special Deputies, were indeed officially appointed by the Tulsa police (Redfearn v. American Central Insurance Company 1926). Moreover, no one was found guilty of arson; the judges claimed that there was no proof that the white rioters had set fires; after all, defective elec-trical wiring or spontaneous combustion could have initiated the fires as well. The effort for reparations continued until 2007 when the Tulsa County District Attorney, Tim Harris in 2008 dismissed the case; after the Supreme Court, in 2005, had already rejected any claims for reparations (Reagan 1998). After more than eight decades, Tulsa’s case closed; ‘we thought we might live long enough to see something happen, but even though I have lived 99 years noth-ing has actually happened’, said Olivia Hooker, one of the last survivors, on the subject of reparations (Mullins 2014).

the renaming of brady street

The Tulsa race riot and war left its mark on the city forever, especially after the end of the legal struggle for recognition. In 2013, the racial differences came to the forefront once again and reminded everyone that the wounds of Tulsa had been open for almost a century. One of the main roads of Greenwood, W. Brady Street, became an issue of controversy among the Tulsans; a reminder that, in a city like Tulsa, race reconciliation is a path with many obstacles. Brady District, located around W. Brady Street, is a vibrant area and many consider it the cultural centre of the city.

The area and the street are named after one of the most important figures of Tulsa, Wyatt Tate Brady. He was a politician, member of the Oklahoma Bar, a shoe manufacturer and merchandiser who had helped with the modernization of Tulsa by supporting the aspiration that the city could become the oil centre of the United States. His personal life is interesting as well; after his marriage with Rachel Davis, of Claremore Cherokee descent, he became a member of the Cherokee tribe and an advocate of their claims against Washington. Brady Hotel, the first with baths in Tulsa, became the meeting point for all the oilmen and politicians. On 29 August 1925, Tate Brady committed suicide at his home, disheartened by his son’s death (Vickery 2009).

The fact that Brady participated in the Race Riot created a major problem in modern Tulsa as well; many citizens believed that it was unacceptable for one of the main roads of Tulsa to hold the name of a white supremacist. He had taken part in the Riot as a night watchman, namely a guard during the night of the Riot in the areas governed by white rioters. An article from Tulsa World issue circulated in 1921 verified his role: ‘Tate Brady, proprietor of the Brady Hotel, who was a member of white men on guard duty along North Main Street all night, said he counted the bodies of five negroes’. Almost a century after the clash, Brady’s name makes people feel disgraced, just as councillor Blake Ewing who stated during a meeting of the Tulsa City coun-cil that he did not want ‘to live in a town that honors dishonorable people’ (Emory 2013a).




Apart from his role during the Riot, Brady was also a member of the Ku Klux Klan. In August 1923, the Governor of Oklahoma declared martial law in order to stop the Klansmen from parading and lynching people; it seems that they were so powerful that the state had to make such a decision in order to stop them. In September 1923, the local chapter of the National Guard organized an in-depth investigation and called about seven hundred people to testify about the activities of the Klan in Oklahoma. One of them was Tate Brady; the transcript of his testimony reveals that, under oath, he admitted that he ‘was a member of the Klan [t]here at one time’ (2011).

It all started in September 2011 when This Land, an Oklahoman magazine, published an article, entitled ‘The nightmare of dreamland’ (Chapman 2011) written by Lee Roy Chapman; it referred to the life of T. Brady. In this article, historian and journalist Chapman wrote about the connections of Brady with the Tulsa chapter of Ku Klux Klan and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The latter was the source for new Klansmen and Brady was an active member of both organizations.

Chapman’s article motivated people to rethink the life of one of the founding fathers of Tulsa, T. Brady. Many Tulsans asked the City authorities to change the name of the street because Brady represented racism and discrimi-nation; in their opinion, his name should not be given to such a liberal place like the Brady District; according to others, his name should not grace any street of Tulsa. People also believed that it delivered controversial messages for the City to honour a prominent racist and active participant in the Riot. However, others stated that the name was of minor importance because the area had a unique and liberal character anyway.

The Tulsa City Council decided to explore the possibility of renaming the street. For weeks, the heated debate divided the Council; even Mayor Bartlett opposed the idea and stated in the media: ‘You can change the name and maybe feel good for 10, 20 minutes and then walk out the door’; ‘but what’s the accomplishment?’ he continued;

To me is receiving an education and getting to a place where those who participated in our racist past, we can show the great strides in educa-tion and business. Those who were taunted are now the employers or the educators […].

(Canfield 2013)

According to the mayor of Tulsa, this would be a costly, time-consuming and unnecessary procedure; he believed that the energy of the people that supported this idea and the amount of sources needed for changing the name should be used for the further financial growth of the area. More specifically he stated: ‘Especially when some parts of our city haven’t participated in the economic development of our community in ways I believe they should have participated […]. To me, that seems like a better exercise than changing some name’ (Canfield 2013).

The City Council had thought of renaming Brady Street to Burlington Street; a 1907 city ordinance related to the names of the streets proved that the latter was the original name of the place; it had been erased and the name ‘Brady’ had been written over it (City of Tulsa 1907). However, some believed that this was not a proper solution because the Burlington family had no connection with Tulsa; allegedly, they originated from New York, they owned slaves and worked in the slave trade.




The mayor was also against that name because, as he pointed out, Brady Arts District business owners were against this action because it would be a financial burden for them to change their business addresses and street signs. Bartlett condemned the Riot but according to his opinion, people should ‘use it as what this city did, not what we do now. [Tulsans should] move forward’.

Despite the controversy, the City Council accepted the change of the name in the end. The street would no longer be W. D. Brady; it would be renamed to M. B. Brady Street. The street would no longer be dedicated to the famous Tulsan entrepreneur but to the famous photographer who had no roots in Tulsa.

M. B. Brady (1822–96) was born in New York. He started his career as a teenager and by 1844 he owned a photography studio. He was a pioneer photographer and one of the first to use his camera to chronicle American history. He asked and received special permission from President Lincoln himself to document the Civil War, a job that Brady thought of as a duty: ‘I regarded myself as under obligation to my country to preserve the faces of its historic men and mothers’. Lincoln allowed him to take photos only if Brady financed the project on his own; despite the risks and difficulties, he perse-vered, and offered his valuable archive to the United States. His persistence and quality made being photographed by him a mark of prestige; as a special-ist in studio photography, he shot the most famous people of his era (Wilson 2013: 5). He recorded first-hand history and worked hard for the preservation of American history.

The tricky decision and the general controversy revealed the tensions between the two communities; once again it seemed race relations in Tulsa were unstable. Clearly, some people chose to remember, others to forget, and the rest to focus only on the financial aspect of such an action.

People opposed to the renaming stated that there was no reason for remembering the past, especially when it disturbed their everyday life; they only wanted to think of the present and focus on it. On the other hand, those who were in favour of renaming believed that by changing the name, the City of Tulsa would be forced to honour the African Americans who had suffered in Tulsa. However, others believed that at the same time the life story of a key Tulsan figure like Brady should be presented in its entirety so people could judge him correctly and independently.

The change of the name did not satisfy most who had supported the idea; they believed that the Council had tricked them. Possibly, if the City had enacted a completely different name, many white Tulsans would have felt betrayed by the decision, mainly because they did not want to give in to the pressure of the black community. On the other hand, if they had kept the same name, African Americans would have felt offended and rejected by the City. Once again, the city was divided and the race issue was at the forefront. It is probable that the City Council had thought of the possible outcomes of the renaming: tensions, arguments, unrest or even clashes. Whatever the name was, people would interpret it in various ways and since the racial aspect was a major part, division seemed inevitable. For that reason, in a word game, they chose to play with the name of Brady. Despite the effort, neither side was satisfied by the decision; as one of the councillors said, ‘this issue has become unnecessarily divisive in our community’ (Ball 2013).

The adoption of M.B. Brady as the name of the street showed that the council, consisting of black and white members, worked effectively in order




to satisfy public opinion as much as possible. As important as it seems that they degraded the status of W.T. Brady, they chose the name of a famous non-racist photographer, who could serve as a means of avoiding further problems, despite the fact that he had no connection with Tulsa whatsoever. It is obvious that their decision derived from the fact that the two surnames were identical, and would keep both communities relatively satisfied. However, those who were in favour of abandoning Brady’s name recognized the intrigue behind the actions of the council. Thus, they accused the local authorities not only of giving in to the white community’s pressure but also of being biased in the decision; in other words that the decision was part of a plot that had already determined that the street’s name would remain the same. Those against W.T. Brady felt that in reality nothing had changed; the name of the street would be the same because people would always refer to it as Brady Street, whether it be W.T or M.B. Brady. While this was not clearly a white and black issue, the general notion was that mostly black people were fighting against the survival of Brady in Tulsan history and the white community was trying to diminish the meaning of their action.

The various reactions prove the controversial feelings among the citizens who participated in the process. ‘Take the Brady down […] and bury it with Tate Brady. That’s where it belongs’ said James Johnson, a citizen who took part in the hearings. Councillor Jack Henderson said: ‘I don’t want to leave here today thinking that we planned this down, like we’re not changing the name of the street’. Another citizen, Carolyn Ingram, said: ‘Because Brady did not change, so it will always be Brady Street to the community’; Councillor Blake Ewing said: ‘The effort here is towards anything that’s an improvement over what the likely outcome would have been, which is that it would have lost’ (Emory 2013a, 2013b).

At least ‘50 citizens addressed the council during the hearings. Media coverage was extensive and many shared their opinions publicly. One said that ‘Brady Street is like celebrating a monster’; another citizen stated that ‘the street is defined by people right now’. One of the white business owners of Brady District said:

The community has never identified itself as being a memorial to Tate Brady;[but] as being a living organism that nurtured in birth from the people that live […], work […]; have come there with their life savings.

On the other hand, James Johnson, an African American, stated:

Timothy McVeigh killed hundreds […] Oklahoma City does not cele-brate him, the Jews do not celebrate […] Hitler. If we give […] Brady more than […] ninety-two years […] we might as well give Alvin Watts and Jake England their street names as well. (KJRH-TV 2013)

The incident troubled the local community to such an extent that the most prestigious educational institution of the city, the University of Tulsa, decided to ensure its status as a liberal institution. In May 2016, the University of Tulsa hired an investigator to examine the names of its buildings in order to find any possible connections to the racist past of Tulsa. A problem was found at the Law School that was dedicated to John Rogers, a famous lawyer and one of the founders of the Law Department of the University. Research showed that Rogers was a prominent KKK member and a segregationist. An examination of




the website of the University of Tulsa (2016) showed that the name of Rogers (University of Tulsa College of Law 2016) has been removed from the building; the University clearly wished to ensure that it would keep completely discon-nected from hate groups and racism in general (Krehbiel 2016). Contrary to the City of Tulsa, the University’s clear position against racism offered a quick and effective solution without controversies and divisive decisions.

conclusions

The renaming of Brady Street proved the existence of racial tensions in twenty-first-century Tulsa. The mistreatment of Tulsa’s racial past and the fact that it was never addressed and discussed adequately had a major negative impact on local society. Tulsa, like American society in its whole should have been able to handle easily its past without strife. Relevant issues should not be challenging for a contemporary society but Tulsa proves that such problems do exist and they can even cause mayhem if the community is not prepared to deal with them. More importantly, a city that suffered from racism to such an extent and gained a prominent position in history for one of the most destruc-tive race riots in United States history, should work harder to reconcile with its history.

Almost a century after the clash, Tulsa seems still to struggle with its past. The right of Tulsans to oblivion, in connection with inadequate historical knowledge did not allow people the necessary familiarization with their past, which would have led to catharsis. The manipulation of memory in schools, which censored or mishandled the story of the riot for years, the court decisions that questioned and disempowered black people to fight for further recognition of their equal status, along with the constant effort of the local authorities to diminish its meaning and impor-tance, resulted in the devaluation of the conflict as a historical incident in the memory of people.

The renaming of the street was the means that highlighted the fragile racial relations in local society. It is a fact that commemorative street or build-ing naming can serve as a connection between the past and present. Shaping collective memory, the names of streets remind inhabitants and visitors of the past of the city; ‘commemorative street names […] conflate history and geog-raphy and merge the past they commemorate into ordinary settings of human life. Embedded into language, they are active participants in the construction and perception of social reality’ (Azaryahu 1997: 481). However, the renaming of Brady Street served as a test for the authorities and the society of Tulsa; they failed; and the deep roots of the problem came to the surface once again.

In addition, it revealed the power of individual memory. Despite the time elapsed and the fact that all the survivors have passed away, there are still people who share a family memory, a community bond, and a sense of justice that motivate them to fight for a cause. It is not only that black Tulsans connected the renaming with the racial past of the city but they also seemed to identify themselves as victims. The notion is the same as it was in 1921: local authorities did not respect them but treated them as second class citi-zens, while all the decisions were meant to diminish African Americans and support white Tulsans.

Cases like the renaming of Brady Street challenged the identity of Tulsan society and revealed the existence of two communities, separated by race. It also presented a division between those who recall history and those who




feel alienated from the past. The first, mostly black, connected Brady with the past in an effort to revive historical memory, while the latter believed that oblivion was the answer to controversies. In this case, the city council juggled with the identical names and manipulated the process and public opinion. It was impossible for those who were in favour of the renaming to fight back because technically the name had changed and they had won the case. It was clear though, as the courts had done some years before, that the city council was unwilling to re-examine the Tulsa Riot and War; it did whatever it could to cover the problem and find the best solution, leaving no space for further assessment.

The unwillingness of the local authorities to confront racism and promote collaboration added further justification to the black community’s notion that the system had always been unfair to them. It is not the street or the name itself; it is the metaphor and the actual meaning of the action. The real renam-ing, and not the ironic and childish solution of an identical name, could serve as a step for recognition of past mistakes and a goodwill gesture of address-ing and dealing with them. The court decisions condemned the aspiration for reparations but the renaming of the street could show the city’s wish to target collective memory and prove that Tulsa is a modern and liberal city. The only interpretation of African Americans and those who opposed racism was that this was a manipulated and orchestrated action that aimed to further cover up the memory and legacy of Greenwood’s past.

In an era of extreme political, social and racial polarization, which even threatens the very meaning of liberalism and freedom, societies should fight against obscurantism and segregation. The history of the United States has numerous examples of injustice and racially rooted controversies with Tulsa being one of the most prominent. Preserving historical memory should not be confused with reviving controversies and problems. On the contrary, recalling history offers an opportunity for uprooting racism through mutual understanding and potential reconciliation. The effort of Tulsa authorities to diminish the historical facts led to the exact opposite path and proved that ‘when a society […] perished, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they come from’ (Ellis 1997: 173).

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suggested citation

Karatzas, K. D. (2018), ‘Interpreting violence: The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot and its legacy’, European Journal of American Culture, 37:2, pp. 127–40, doi: 10.1386/ejac.37.2.127_1

contributor details

Dr Konstantinos D. Karatzas is a research fellow at the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, UK, and the International Economic Relations (IDOS), Greece. He has a Ph.D. in modern history by the University of Zaragoza, Spain (2017). He is a specialist in modern African American history with a particular interest in collective memory, identity and political and racial violence. He received the first-ever scholarship for doctoral studies in American History by the Greek State Scholarship Foundation-IKY (2010–14). He is the guest editor of the 2017 and 2018 special issues on violence of the European Journal of American Culture (EJAC). His first book with the title Violence and Memory in the United States: The Case of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot will be published by Routledge, USA, in 2018.


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Contact: London Centre for Interdisclinary Research, 22 Mare Street, London, E8 4RT, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Konstantinos D. Karatzas has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


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